- Correction: Nov. 19, 2016: "set pointnumber .." does not work. "pointnumber" option is applicable only in the "plot ..." command as same as the "pointinterval".

- Patched and compiled binaries (executables) are also available for Linux Mint (*.deb) and Windows (*.zip) at the download link above. The windows version is not an installer. Extract in any place and add the path of "gnuplot/bin" to the $PATH environmental variable, or put the link of wgnuplot.exe to the start menu.

- Correction of the patch: Jan. 28, 2017: now it does not use random number to fluctuate the offset of the first drawn point.

- Correction of the patch: Jan. 30, 2017: I changed the algorithm for the shifting of the starting offset of the points; now, it looks much better, while the number of points actually drawn can change by missing a point the the edge; it should be no problem; also, fixes were made for consistency in lines/points style handling. (Thanks to comments by Ethan!)

adding an image to make this page look a bit better :-)

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Finally, this "pointnumber" function was added in the new version 5.2! Now, the first release candidate RC1 is available. (as of June 1, 2017)

Bug in 5.2 RC1: When your initialization file .gnuplot includes "set style ..." before definition of terminal (e.g. "set term unknown"), it dies with "Segmentation fault". If it happens, just add "set terminal unknown" at the beginning of .gnuplot.

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Gnuplot 5.2.0 including the "pointnumber" is finally released as an official version (Sep. 4, 2017)

Then, you will find that the yrange is not drawn as specified in the inline range [20:200]. It happens for log scaled y-axis made by "set logscale" in stead of newly introduced "set nonlinear". So, it is related to the "nonlinear", and seems to have relation also to other newly implemented functions and the fix is not easy. A fix is proposed in the developmental version 5.3 and the patch seems to work for a while, at least for this specific problem. It is said a fix may affect other issues.

Anyway, the patch (privided for 5.3, fixed for 5.2 source) and the *.deb binary with the patch is available[HERE] (...5.2.0-km1) (compiled on Ubuntu 16.04)

To work around with the normal 5.2.0, using yrange [ : ] or specifying log scale by "set nonlinear" will do.